W.S. Merwin “For the Anniversary of My Death”

There is a certain poignancy that comes with thinking that today could eventually be the anniversary of your own death. There is a certain mystery involved surrounding death, a certain wonder and fear, the one thing that all know that is inevitable. So why live in fear, of something that is in fact inevitable, but something that is still at least one second away; one second of life. Time and space is examined not necessarily in a literal sense, but a figurative sense. There is a wonder of when and a curiosity of how. The poem ends with a wren bowing, after three days of rain, and not knowing to what he is bowing. We need to learn to accept certain things, such as the inevitability of death and in the mean time; live life.